Deep learning is a powerful tool to help with the automated classification of data. However, designing a deep learning network that works well for your data is not trivial: it requires the user to choose the number of layers in the network, the number of nodes in each layer, the type of each layer, and so forth. With so many degrees of freedom, finding the network that is right for your data is an arduous task. Moreover, each network still needs to be calibrated or trained before it can be usefully applied for automated classification of data.

mcfly simplifies this process by making explicit the required steps while offering useful default values at each step. mcfly then proceeds by trying out many different network configurations, training each one to the data provided by the user. It subsequently lists the performance of each network, along with a visualization that helps the user judge each network's tendency to overfit or underfit the data.